In 1978, Stephen King published The Stand. According to the Wikipedia page, it was 823 pages long, which was his longest book to date at the time (it was his fifth published novel), but it was republished in 1990 as the uncut and complete version. This one was 1,152 pages.
In 1986, King published It, at a whopping 1,138 pages. This was almost unheard of, for a horror novel.
My first two novels (both in the horror genre, and both at this time are unpublished) were over 1,000 pages long. Keep in mind, this was on my Brother word processor, and the average words per page was between 250-350 words. If my math is correct, that means my first two novels totaled 500K-700K.
Turn back the clocks a bit as these were the days of looking for an agent, praying someone would notice you, and then . . . well, sitting back while the royalty checks came flying in. Okay, I know that's hardly ever the case.
When I contacted agents, I was proud that I could tell them I had a 1,000 page whopper of a horror novel. Funny thing was, no one ever said it was too long. But knowing more about word counts now, the usual horror novel is roughly 65-80K. These were definitely too long.
But what King did was give us permission to write a horror novel that was longer than others. I had no idea, at the time, that novels of this length were unusual. Had he wrote It or The Stand before Carrie, The Shining, or Salem's Lot, chances are they wouldn't be published.
Since I had read the longer novels, that was what my mind worked out. Did my first two books work?
Sort of.
I will tell you this: both have been pared down, and the second one will see publication around early 2018.
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